The Museum of Decay
An Artefact of Natural Reclamation
The Museum of Decay is a post-humanist reinterpretation of the museum typology that challenges architecture's traditional pursuit of permanence and human dominance in response to the ongoing biodiversity crisis. Rather than preserving objects against time, the project embraces deterioration as an active process of ecological succession, allowing nature to become both a curator and an occupant in design.
As a columbarium, the Museum of Decay reimagines death not as finality, but as a chance for transformation, connection and commemoration. Mourning is woven into the landscape through temporary, biodegradable memorials embedded with seeds and ashes, with their gradual erosion transforming personal grief into ecological renewal, preserving the memory of those honoured through the germination of new life. Located on Pomona Island, the proposal creates shared spaces for making and placing memorials, encouraging collective reflection and reconnection between people and natural cycles of life, death and decay. As human presence slowly recedes, built form surrenders agency to nature, the site itself becomes an artefact of former occupation, and the structure now stands as an immovable protest of natural reclamation.
